The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (26 page)

Company
SAMUEL BECKETT

Women in a River Landscape
HEINRICH BÖLL

Invisible Cities
ITALO CALVINO

The Big Sleep
RAYMOND CHANDLER

Diary of a Bad Year
J. M. COETZEE

Nowhere Man
ALEKSANDAR HEMON

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
MICHAEL ONDAATJE

Why Did I Ever
MARY ROBISON

Shoplifting from American Apparel
TAO LIN

Cat’s Cradle
KURT VONNEGUT

The Successor

ISMAIL KADARE

•   •   •

The Last Hundred Days

PATRICK MCGUINNESS

Y
our average dictator is more likely to sit down for an evening with a manual on how to rule the world and avoid being taken down than with a good novel. Which is a shame, because, given the right prescription of fiction, a dictator might improve his or her human rights record considerably. Instead, we address this ailment to the mini-tyrants who micromanage their companies and their households in a despotic manner. These more parochial dictators spend their time amassing fortunes instead of weapons, and tend to fire those who disappoint them rather than make them disappear. But their method of domination using fear and coercion as their tools is exactly the same and can cause plenty of misery in the little empire over which they rule. Look in the mirror. If you find one such tyrant staring back, make these novels your bedtime reading and prepare for a reshuffle of your realm.

The Successor
by Albanian writer Ismail Kadare—himself an inhabitant of a once repressive regime—will show you why you don’t have any close friends. The story opens with the sudden death of the nominated successor to a communist-style dictator in the Land of the Eagles (Albania). The death is not altogether surprising, as an alarming number of “suicides” seem to happen in this dictator’s vicinity. People who get too close to him don’t tend to live for very long. Chillingly, Kadare reveals the constant state of paranoia in which the dictator’s friends and family live, as we glimpse the thoughts of those characters most at risk. Fear, paranoia, and a dreamlike sense of doom run rife—infecting, of course, none more than the dictator himself. Those of you who have a tendency to act as a dictator in the sphere of the domestic, take note: no one wants to live in a house that’s more about hubris than home. Whether through envy or anger, an uprising will most likely bring about your downfall in the end.

And when that happens, there’s no getting around it, dictator wannabes: a horrible death awaits. Nowhere is this inevitability more apparent than in Patrick McGuinness’s novel
The Last Hundred Days.
Enjoyably depressing, it describes the deposing of the real-life tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania. While an unnamed young Englishman observes the events leading up to Ceausescu’s execution, his friend Leo obsessively records the overnight
disappearances of Bucharest’s streets and buildings. Leo’s book
The City of Lost Walks
was originally conceived as a guide to the city, but is fast becoming a book of yearning for places lost at the hands of the police state. The horrible denouement is brilliantly and powerfully drawn.

Despots large and small, read this and rue the day you chose to strike terror into the hearts of those around you, destroying your relationships, and instilling paranoia and distrust in your intimates. Whether you run a war-torn state, an international corporation, or a semidetached house inhabited by a family of five, you will surely see reason, abdicate in a hurry, and invite a democracy to be installed in your place.

See also:
Bully, being a
•
Control freak, being a

Middlesex

JEFFREY EUGENIDES

•   •   •

A Confederacy of Dunces

JOHN KENNEDY TOOLE

I
t may be that some lucky, delusional solipsist somewhere on the planet has at all times been convinced she (or he) feels exactly like everybody else on the inside: completely, blessedly unremarkable and typical in every way. But as a rule, most people fall into one of two groups. They’re either normal and don’t know it, or abnormal and don’t know it. This state of affairs is not permanent; it can turn on a dime. At one point or another everyone feels different. But different than
what
? That’s the real question.

There may be no book that more richly and inventively handles the question of difference than Jeffrey Eugenides’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel
Middlesex
. In it, a girl in a warm and noisy Greek American family in Michigan discovers in adolescence that she is not a girl after all, but a boy. Her name is Calliope (“Cal”) Stephanides, and she has a genetic anomaly that reveals itself only when she hits puberty. Cal’s typical Michigan teenage life is completely overturned when the physiological changes start raining down on her—that is, him. You think
you
were weird at thirteen? Be glad you weren’t Cal.

And yet, Cal’s beautifully nuanced reflections are helpful to anyone who’s ever felt out of place or eccentric. Eugenides’s generous expression of Cal’s character shows how full and uncontainable the human personality is,
how much it exceeds commonly assumed boundaries. “Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in ‘sadness,’ ‘joy,’ or ‘regret,’” Cal thinks. “I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, ‘the happiness that attends disaster.’ Or: ‘the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.’” Eugenides will bring these to you through the panacea of his literary imagination, so you can celebrate whatever difference you may believe yourself (at the moment) to possess.

Then again, there’s a more objective kind of difference that deserves consideration: the purely external difference you might call the grotesque, including extreme beauty, extreme hideousness, or extreme appearance and behavior generally—of the sort that either seeks or commands attention. This kind of difference appears in tabloids and on entertainment television in the form of people who court celebrity by bearing eight babies simultaneously, dressing like flesh-eating vampires, wearing loincloths in public, or singing, dancing, scoring goals, or winning elections. It is not unusual for those who self-consciously choose to be different to take pride in their aberration. Often, they write memoirs. But one of the more memorable fictional examples of this tendency is embodied in the oozing, corpulent form of Ignatius J. Reilly, the obese, unclean, arrogant, and effulgent hero of John Kennedy Toole’s picaresque New Orleans novel
A Confederacy of Dunces
. The title of the book comes from Jonathan Swift’s piercing remark: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” In his own opinion (and doubtless in Toole’s) the revolting, cocky, garrulous Ignatius J. Reilly is such a genius. If you yearn to stand apart and excel in this manner, make him your blueprint.

See also:
Foreign, being
•
Hype, put off by
•
Left out, feeling
•
Outsider, being an

There but for the

ALI SMITH

C
old sweat. Strange new rash. Sudden sickness. Facial tics. Inability to find anything clean to wear. Discovery of vital work to be done for tomorrow. Urge to sit and talk to the babysitter for an hour. These are the symptoms of the dinner party avoider. Partner of avoider, meanwhile, grits
teeth and cajoles. They’re about to leave at last when shrinking violet announces urgent need to go to the bathroom and locks self in there. At which point, exasperated partner slips
There but for the
under the door . . .

Our cure for a chronic fear of dinner parties tells the story of Miles, who leaves a dinner party (having first purloined a saltcellar) and locks himself in a spare room upstairs. He stays there for several weeks. Word spreads, and while the world observes him through a window from Greenwich Park, setting up camps to encourage his “protest,” he becomes a minor celebrity.